Sustaining Rocky Mountain Landscapes: Science,Policy, and Management for the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem

In this commentary, we wish to draw from Kathryn's experience in Askole to complicate the argument we developed in favor of an autoethnographic sensibility in the earlier article in this issue (Butz and Besio 2004 ButzDavid KathrynBesio 2004 The value of autoethnography for field research in transcultural settings. The Professional Geographer 56 3 350 60 [Google Scholar]). Just as we used David's first-person singular voice in much of that article, we use Kathryn's voice here to reflect the central influence of her research circumstances on the points that we make. We will return to the first-person plural voice in the commentary's conclusion where we attempt to synthesize the lessons of our two sets of research experiences.     

Wild things in urban places: America's largest cities and multi-scales of governance for endangered species conservation

Endangered species live inside the world's most densely populated cities. In the United States, the Fish and Wildlife Service is responsible for the protection and recovery of endangered species – wherever those species are found. Unfortunately, very little is known about urban endangered species policy or programs. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the five largest cities in the United States and examines issue of governance around conservation. Cities have a responsibility to steward the environment, but through the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service has a legal mandate to protect endangered species throughout the country. Thus, this paper asks: What is the USFWS doing inside cities to recover endangered species? What are cities doing? Conservation is a shared duty but it is not clear that anyone is taking responsibility for urban endangered species.     

Emerging trends in urbanizing Palestine: neglected city-builders beyond the occupation

In this article, we draw attention to trends in land transformation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada, after which a surge of investment from Gulf countries entered Palestine, almost exclusively in the West Bank. The occupied Palestinian territories have attracted a great deal of attention from media and academics, yet the vast majority of scholarship focuses on the conflict and the variety of social, economic, and political repercussions of the on-going Israeli occupation. While the occupation has undeniably serious impacts on every aspect of life for Palestinians, the near-exclusive focus on the conflict means that significant new trends, such as urban mega-developments and emerging market-based urbanisation processes, have been largely overlooked. We outline three directions for future research: the assemblage of “neglected city-builders” shaping current urbanization processes in Palestine; the ideas, policies, and norms circulating in the West Bank; and the social, spatial, economic, and other impacts of these new urban developments.     

Evaluating the Temporal and Spatial Urban Expansion Patterns of Guangzhou from 1979 to 2003 by Remote Sensing and GIS Methods

China has experienced and is experiencing expeditious urban expansion in the recent decades, especially in the coastal areas and big cities. Rapid urban expansion and dramatic changes of landscape have caused great economic, environmental and social impacts consequently. It is crucial to understand urban temporal, spatial expansion patterns and their related effects. In this paper, urban expansion of Guangzhou, a rapid growing city in south‐east China, from 1979 to 2003 is studied temporally and spatially. Four time ranges including 1979–1990, 1990–1995, 1995–2000 and 2000–2003 are designed and the urban expansion area, expansion rate and the spatial expansion pattern are discussed by using remote sensing data and Geographical Information System (GIS) tool. Two transects are designed along two axes of Guangzhou expansion and the structural of urban expansion patches at different orientations are compared in order to quantitively understand the urban expansion of Guangzhou during the past 24 years. The gradient analysis integrating multi‐temporal data is performed in order to analyze and compare the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban expansion. Two indices of compactness and fractal dimensional index are used to describe the urban developing pattern in the study time durations. And the influence of different types of traffic roads to urban expansion is evaluated using the buffer analysis of GIS. The results show that: (1) temporally, urban area of Guangzhou increase 296.54 km² from 141.15 km² in 1979 to 437.70 km² in 2003 and the increasing rate is up to 210.08%; (2) spatially, Guangzhou has different urban expanding directions in different stages and the general expanding directions are towards northeast, north, southeast and north in four studied time ranges; (3) transportation lines play a very important role in urban expansion of Guangzhou, but different types of road have different impacts. National roads and highways exhibit stronger control to urban expansion than provincial roads; and (4) expansion of Guangzhou has gradually changed from a compact pattern to leapfrogging and disordering patterns.     

Population landscape: a geometric approach to studying spatial patterns of the US urban hierarchy

We present a geometric and graphic approach to studying spatial patterns of urban hierarchy in the US. The multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagram is found to be effective for visualizing theoretical regions delineated by socio‐economic variables. The population landscape of the continental US demonstrates overall and stepwise patterns reflecting population, neighborhood and distance, with overwhelming influence from huge metropolitan areas. Stepwise exploration and cluster analysis of the spatial pattern reveal an urban hierarchy. Attributes and arrangement are the two important factors of urban hierarchy, with attribute having a stronger local influence and arrangement having a stronger global influence. The study also presents a variation of Zipf's law to visualize the rank‐size distribution from tabular and statistical space to map space.     

南京地区下垫面变化对城市热岛效应影响的数值模拟

利用新一代中尺度研究和预报模式(Weather Research and Forecasting Model,简称WRF)分别耦合多冠层、单冠层和平板模式三种情况进行南京地区2007年8月1日的天气过程模拟,分析不同城市冠层方案对南京气象场的模拟效果。在此基础上,结合模拟效果最好的城市冠层方案,研究南京城市下垫面的变化对其热岛的影响。结果表明:多冠层方案对近地面气温、10 m风场的模拟效果最好;城区的扩张使南京地区近地面气温升高,主要表现为城市区域夜间升温显著,并且导致热岛强度明显增强;城市扩张后,城区白天风速大范围地减小,同时热岛环流更加显著,且具有明显的城市热岛的"下游效应"。     

湿地公园建设及其生态旅游发展比较研究——以杭州西溪、黄山太平湖和淮北南湖三个国家级湿地公园为例

现有湿地公园仅对湿地公园个案进行研究,研究结果难以上升到理论高度,探索了利用比较研究的方法研究湿地公园。通过对杭州西溪、黄山太平湖和淮北南湖3个国家级湿地公园建设情况和生态旅游发展的SWOT分析与比较研究,指出了湿地公园建设中存在的问题及其生态旅游发展的优势和劣势、面临的机遇和挑战,对湿地公园的建设和生态旅游发展提出了对策和建议。     

Sweet Auburn: Constructing Atlanta's Auburn Avenue as a Heritage Tourist Destination

Utilizing redevelopment plans created by Central Atlanta Progress, this study explores the process of constructing a heritage tourist landscape on Atlanta's Auburn Avenue. Once home to the wealthiest African American community in the United States, Auburn Avenue went through a period of economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000, planners for the City of Atlanta focused on redeveloping the Auburn Avenue corridor. At that time, Central Atlanta Progress began to update plans to convert Auburn Avenue into the United States' premier African American tourist destination. Utilizing those plans, this article argues that the city's redevelopment vision ties into particular aspects of African American identity, which link to neoliberal economic policies in an effort to turn Auburn Avenue into a "culturetainment" district. This vision is juxtaposed against the reaction of community residents who seek an alternative redevelopment vision.     

Night on Earth: Mapping decadal changes of anthropogenic night light in Asia

The defense meteorological satellite program (DMSP) operational linescan system (OLS) sensors have imaged emitted light from Earth's surface since the 1970s. Temporal overlap in the missions of 5 OLS sensors allows for intercalibration of the annual composites over the past 19 years (Elvidge et al., 2009). The resulting image time series captures a spatiotemporal signature of the growth and evolution of lighted human settlements and development. We use empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis and the temporal feature space to characterize and quantify patterns of temporal change in stable night light brightness and spatial extent since 1992. Temporal EOF analysis provides a statistical basis for representing spatially abundant temporal patterns in the image time series as uncorrelated vectors of brightness as a function of time from 1992 to 2009. The variance partition of the eigenvalue spectrum combined with temporal structure of the EOFs and spatial structure of the PCs provides a basis for distinguishing between deterministic multi-year trends and stochastic year-to-year variance. The low order EOFs and principal components (PC) space together discriminate both earlier (1990s) and later (2000s) increases and decreases in brightness. Inverse transformation of these low order dimensions reduces stochastic variance sufficiently so that tri-temporal composites depict potentially deterministic decadal trends. The most pronounced changes occur in Asia. At critical brightness threshold we find an 18% increase in the number of spatially distinct lights and an 80% increase in lighted area in southern and eastern Asia between 1992 and 2009. During this time both China and India experienced a ∼20% increase in number of lights and a ∼270% increase in lighted area – although the timing of the increase is later in China than in India. Throughout Asia a variety of different patterns of brightness increase are apparent in tri-temporal brightness composites – as well as some conspicuous areas of apparently decreasing background luminance and, in many places, intermittent light suggesting development of infrastructure rather than persistently lighted development. Vicarious validation using higher resolution Landsat imagery verifies multiple phases of urban growth in several cities as well as the consistent presence of low DN (<∼15) background luminance for many agricultural areas. Lights also allow us to quantify changes in the size distribution and connectedness of different intensities of development. Over a wide range of brightnesses, the size distributions of spatially contiguous lighted area are consistent with power laws with exponents near −1 as predicted by Zipf's Law for cities. However, the larger lighted segments are much larger than individual cities; they correspond to vast spatial networks of contiguous development (Small et al., 2011).